(Paper presented at the Critical Musicology Forum, City
University, January 2001)

This paper examines the
presence of intertextuality in orchestral film scores.The significance of these musical devices
lies in their function as referents of the kind that Noel Carroll - in his 1982
paper “The future of allusion” - identified as “a major expressive devise..., a
means that directors use to make comments on the fictional world of their
films.” A similar argument can be made for the musical narrative, and this
paper examines the presence of the director’s use of musical quotation and the
composer’s use of allusion as a means of commentary and intertextualisation.

Robert Hatten draws a
distinction between stylistic allusion to a musical genre, era
or school and strategic allusions to a specific piece of music. Stylistic
allusion is a mainstay of film music - theorists who list functions of film
music usually include categories of music that locate a film in time and place,
and this is done by allusion to a musical convention, whether its the use of
exotic scales to conjure up non-Western cultures, the use of harpsichords for
the 18th century or country music for the American South. A film uses these cultural
musical codes to identify itself to an audience by reference to the existing
body of films that have used that same code as part of the mechanism by which a
filmic genre is established. In particular, main title music, played at the
outset of the film often before the visual narrative has begun, uses this
intertextual mechanism to prime the audience for the film they are about to
see.

Strategic allusion in film music is a related issue and
the point at which an allusion ceases to be strategic and becomes stylistic is
far from clear-cut. Some examples of strategic allusion are very obvious. Brian
de Palma’s Carrie is a film which makes intertextual references at a
number of levels to Hitchcock’s Psycho. We have references in terms of
characterization, narrative, visual imagery and music. Both films deal with the
relationship of a child with its mother; with sexual repression leading to the
murder of various objects of desire. The large kitchen knife with which Norman kills his victims
in Psycho is a prominent visual motif in Carrie, and the main
weapon with which the title character eventually kills her Mother; and
similarly, Carrie borrows Herrmann’s musical motif associated with
stabbing in Psycho’s famous shower scene. The music with which a
mentally disturbed Norman
kills in Psycho becomes the music representing the means by which the
comparably mentally disturbed Carrie acts and ultimately kills: the Psycho
music becomes the psychic music.

The existence of strategic allusion owes at
least something to the temp track, the music taken from existing recordings
that the film is edited to in advance of the score’s completion, which may
become so beloved of the director that the composer is persuaded to make his or
her score sound as much like it as possible. The most notorious case of a temp
track making its presence felt in a film is Kubrick’s2001, where Alex North’s score was entirely discarded in favour of the
temp track: Thus spakeZarathustra,
The Blue Danube, Ligeti and Khatchaturian. The opening bars from Thus SpakeZarathustra, the main
title music in 2001, correspond to the Prologue of Nietszche’s
epic poem, in which the prophet sits alone at the top of a mountain and watches
the sunrise, announcing the dawning of not simply a new day but of a new era,
the coming of the Superman who Nietzsche saw as being the next stage in man’s
spiritual evolution: and it doesn't take the most enormous leap of the
imagination to see how this might act as a parallel and commentary on 2001’s
overall premise.

The Ligeti music - primarily
the Kyrie from the Requiem and Atmospheres
makes considerable use of drones and clusters, music which is part of the
vocabulary of horror films in the creation of suspense, and is strongly
associated in this film with the idea of space as containing some vast mystery
which may be a force for either good or evil, personified by the black
monolith.This music in particular has
been alluded to in other film scores concerned with space and possibly
malevolent forces. One is John William’s score for Close Encounters of the
Third Kind, where the alien abduction of a child is accompanied by very 2001-esque
music; another is Elliot Goldenthal’s main title
music for Alien 3.Again, we have
atonality and microtonality, drones and clusters, and
also the setting of a liturgical text. In 2001, the text is the Kyrie, which doesn’t appear to have any obvious
significance in terms of the narrative beyond its part in the Requiem
with its idea of death as rebirth; but in Alien 3, the text is a setting
of the Agnus Dei, and towards the end of the film,
the significance of the anthem to the sacrificial lamb who dies to take away
the sins of the world, and thereby saves it, becomes apparent as Ripley
immolates herself to destroy the alien embryo growing inside her.

As Robert Stam has recently
put it, 'Any text that has slept with another text... hasnecessarily slept with all the texts
the other text has slept with' (Stam 2000, 202).
Texts are promiscuous, and 2001, without a note of original music in it, is one
of the most promiscuous of them all. In 1994, two years after Alien 3,
Goldenthal wrote two more film scores, Interview with the vampire and
the third film in the Batman series.

There are two notable features about the main title
theme that he wrote for Interview which are striking from the point of
view of intertextuality. Firstly, it is again a setting of a liturgical text
associated with the Requiem mass; and again, as in his music for Alien 3,
Goldenthal sets it for a boy treble. As in Alien 3, the text set is a
direct commentary on the narrative: the words free me from myself and give us
eternal light take on new meaning when sung in the context of a technically
immortal vampire who can, nonetheless, be killed by daylight. Louis, the
eponymous vampire here, has been depressed for about 200 years, and in a sense
this is his own requiem for the undead. But, as Stam would have it, by linking this film to Alien 3 through
the main title music, Goldenthal in turn refers us
back to 2001. The Requiem, particularly the Agnus
Dei and the Libera me, deal with transfiguration
through death: as indeed does 2001: the Ligeti
music is associated with the monolith, the herald and instrument of
transformation; and Dave Bowman, having begun his journey through the star gate
to the accompaniment of the Kyrie, is then himself
transformed, apparently dying and being reborn as the star child. Ripley starts
both Alien 2 and Alien 3 in suspended animation, a simulated
death, is resuscitated, is forced through processes of transformation in all
three films (if only in the ever decreasing length of her hair) before her
eventual transfiguration into Ripley, Mother and Martyr, the sacrificial lamb
in Alien 3. Her unlikely resurrection in the fourth alien film
perpetuates her saviour-like status.

Interview with the
vampire again continues the theme of
transfiguration through death: Louis’s transformation to undeath
at the start of the film and then his constant yearning for a further
transformation to escape from his existence, epitomized by the main title
theme, which dominates the musical soundtrack. What both Alien 3 and Interview
have in common that comes from Goldenthal rather than Ligeti
is the use of the voices: in place of the Kyrie’s
mixed choir, both times Goldenthal uses a child’s voice, juxtaposing innocence
with the evil represented by both film’s title character’s: innocent human
child against reputedly evil Other. Musically, all three films share the use of
drones, or pedal notes in the case of the musically much more conventional
Interview, and a certain lack of rhythmic drive: none of these films have
anything approaching an audible beat to them: they drift through space.

The other notable aspect of Interview’s main
title is its relationship with Elfman’s Batman theme. Phillip Tagg, in his paper
“Tritonal Crime”, makes a case for the tritone (also known as the augmented fourth) as
representative of all things criminal in film and TV music: a similar case can
be made for the tritone as representative of all things
supernatural, a real diabolus in musica, heard in the use of the Lydian mode in the main
titles of films including Jumanji and The
Witches of Eastwick, and as a prominent feature
of the main title of Beetlejuice, all
supernatural comedies set in New England. Both interpretations are equally
justified: the tritone has become a convention for
representing a variety of Others, be they criminal,
evil, supernatural. There can be no doubt that Goldenthal listened closely to
the Elfman scores before writing his 1994 score for Batman Forever, and
the melodies of Elfman’s Batman theme and Goldenthal’s
theme for his other 1994 score, Interview, whilst rhythmically very
different, have an unquestionably similar basic outline which emphasizes the
interval of the augmented fourth found between notes two and six of the minor
scale: both themes consist of the notes of the tonic triad, plus that tritone. In fact, this phrase can be found in other films
dealing with vampires and the supernatural in particular, such as Coppola’s Dracula
and even a supernatural comedy such as The Burbs,
to the extent that if could be argued as a museme, a
unit of meaningful musical sound, the meaning in this case being associated
with the forces of darkness.

What’s more, we have a
song lyric associated with the same basic theme from Irving Berlin:

There
may be trouble ahead

But
whilst there’s moonlight and music and love and romance

Let’s
face the music and dance

It has to be pointed out that Elfman denies even
knowing the song (which is actually rather unlikely, given his interest in
pre-WWII jazz) and it was not intentionally used as any kind of model for the
Batman theme, but it does neatly summarise the key elements of the film: love,
romance, moonlight and trouble.

In Goldenthal’s score, it
connects Batman to vampires. And what is Batman if not vampire as superhero? He
goes around at night, has a long black cape, appears to turn into a bat, is
dark and gothic and yet, just like the vampire of Interview, he is also a
tragic hero.

So, having started
with 2001, and gone via Alien 3 and Interview
with a vampire to Batman, it seems appropriate that Batman
should take us back to 2001. Nietzsche in his poem and Kubrick in his film are both, in their own ways, talking
about the Superman; Strauss’s music is the bridge that connects them. Batman is
obviously the wrong Superhero, but nonetheless, Strauss creates the link again.
At the end of the 1989 film, the bat-signal is shone upon the sky, a disc
rather than one of Kubrick’s spheres. At the same
time, we hear an unmistakably Straussian allusion as
the camera pans up the building to reveal Batman, silhouetted against the night
sky: as before the music alluded to the dawning of a brave new day in the
history of mankind, now it refers to a brave new night in Gotham City, guarded
by not Superman but Batman.

To conclude, the question must be asked: “for whom do these allusion exist”? In his essay, Noel Carroll talks of
films operating on two levels when they start playing with allusion. At one level,
the film exists as an apparently self-contained artefact: some one who has
general acquaintance with film should be able to enjoy and understand the film
largely in isolation from an acquaintance with other films. At the other level,
the film exists as a self-consciously intertextual object aimed at
film-literate aficionados, who can enjoy the film for itself and at the same
time derive pleasure from recognition of allusions to other films, genres and
cinematic styles and conventions. Arguably, exactly the same situation exists
for film music: failing to spot the allusion should not damage one’s experience
of the film, and the allusions are aimed, if they are aimed at all, at whoever
is sufficiently acquainted with the appropriate repertoire to be make the connections. Carroll worried that, in the wrong
hands, allusion threatened to become an end in itself, with films ceasing to be
about anything other than other films in a triumph of style and affectation
over meaning.

With orchestral film music, intertextuality plays a
substantial role in how films are understood. In terms of stylistic allusion,
it plays a role in the formation and confirmation of codes and conventions,
which are in part a labour-saving device, musical short-hand for the desired effect
in a aspect of film-making that is usually done in a hurry, but equally tap
into cultural understandings of musical meaning that allow us to understand
what the music is saying in relation to the image. Strategic musical allusion
is a means by which either a composer or director can use music, as Carroll
puts it, to make comments on the fictional world of their films, and this often
occurs in conjunction with a parallel visual allusion, as in the case of Carrie
and the Psycho knife, or Alien 3 and the vision of space. It
could even be argued that intertextuality is a mechanism by which meaning is
created in film music. Far from being the potential dead-end that Carroll
believed it to threaten for film, intertextuality itself is an important aspect
of narrative in film music, complementing, enhancing and interpreting the
nature of what we see, whether through stylistic or strategic allusion.